You get a much better result when you inculcate virtue on a private and individual basis than when you attempt to impose it from above. That’s why we conservatives are so concerned about the breakdown of the American family. It is within the context of a family that we are meant to learn to difference between right and wrong. In the absence of stable, socially supported family units, many people lose their way morally — and government dependence increases.

Writing recently in the Washington Post, environmental guru Bill McKibben asserted that the number and severity of recent weather events, such as the tornado in Joplin, Mo., are too great not to be the result of fossil-fuel induced climate change. He suggested that government’s failure to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases will result in more violent weather and weather-related deaths in the future.

And pointing to the tragedy in Joplin, Mr. McKibben summarily dismissed the idea that, if climate change really is occurring, human beings can successfully adapt to it.

There’s one problem with this global-warming chicken little-ism. It has little to do with reality. National Weather Service data on weather-related fatalities since 1940 show that the risks of Americans being killed by violent weather have fallen significantly over the past 70 years.

The longer lead times are probably the biggest help as far as survival rates go. The other night, the NWS issued a tornado warning for Dale City/Woodbridge for a storm that was speeding up the I-95 corridor, and sure enough, that warning preceeded any actual bad weather by about twenty minutes. Hooray for technology!

(By the way, there was no confirmed tornado, though conditions did get rather hairy for a bit.)

*****

Meanwhile, while I was away, Bill Whittle put out another vid, this time on Obama’s foreign policy:

*****

And lastly, in case you missed it, here is Iowahawk on our higher education bubble:

If Whittle wanted to run for office, he’d have my vote…this guy is not only a brilliant debater and amongst the most confident and emotionally-controlled (yet emotionally driven) people I’ve ever seen speak…he’s also a throwback to a time when it was OK to love your country and be proud of all we’ve accomplished.

In an effort to prove, once again, that a purely public-funded “company” is utterly incapable of producing quality results at a reasonable cost, NASA failed once again to get a key set of scientific instruments into orbit…the fourth major equipment failure/disaster in the last 8 years. The Glory satellite had instruments that would be able to get accurate observations of atmospheric aerosol concentrations (small impurities in the basic soup that is the planet’s atmosphere) and their influences on Earth’s radiation budget, as well as an instrument that would make more accurate measurements of the total solar irradiance impacting the Earth. Those data would have been hugely helpful to the study of Earth’s changing climate, but instead, we are left with a cloud of debris falling into the Pacific and another group of skilled scientists with nothing to show for years of hard work. And all because NASA’s economic structure is deeply flawed.

Now, some linkage to a great piece by Tea Party activist and space enthusiast Bill Whittle on the reason for NASA’s rising tide of utter failures and hemorrhaging funds – a hint: it all comes down to how public sector “businesses” make contracts with the private companies that they hire to do their work.

Let me bottom line this for you…if we ever want our space program to recover from its’ current doldrums, we must begin considering options for privatizing the mechanics of production. Let the scientists solve scientific problems and analyze the results. Let BUSINESS put us into space. I guarantee that the results will cost fewer lives, less money, and less time and produce better data.